Focus back on Hogan after tax adviser pleads guilty

The Australian Crime Commission began investigating Paul Hogan (pictured), his artistic collaborator, John Cornell, and others in 2004 as part of tax evasion probe Project Wickenby.
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Documents filed by
Paul Hogan
’s lawyers in a US court threaten to reopen an eight-year investigation of the Crocodile Dundee producer’s tax affairs, after he claimed his Swiss tax adviser had defrauded him over a $34 million Swiss bank account.

Mr Hogan’s US lawyers launched legal action in Los Angeles on October 30 last year to seize control of the funds from his Swiss tax adviser
Strachans
, four days after Strachans partner
Philip de Figueiredo
pleaded guilty to three charges of tax fraud in Brisbane as part of a plea deal under which he agreed to assist Australian authorities.

Mr de Figueiredo is in a unique position to provide details about Mr Hogan’s offshore holdings. He set up account 379865 at Corner Banca SA in Lausanne and co-signed a form on September 13, 2005, which noted that Mr Hogan was the beneficial owner of the account, which may have held as much as $US40 million. Mr de Figueiredo’s signature appears throughout the Corner Banca records filed before the Superior Court of California.

Account 379865 was in the name of a British Virgin Islands company,
Graselle SA
, which held the funds as trustee for Quatre Saisons Trust.

The Australian Crime Commission claimed in Australian court proceedings that Quatre Saisons was set up by Strachans in 1994 to hold proceeds from the Crocodile Dundee films for Mr Hogan, as well as undeclared income from other schemes, but dropped its investigation in November 2010.

In November 2005, within days of being questioned under oath by the Australian Crime Commission, Mr Hogan’s US lawyer Schuyler Moore set up a new trust in California, the Carthage Trust, which took over the assets of Quatre Saisons Trust, which remained in the same bank account.

By September 2010, with Mr de Figueiredo facing extradition to Australia from Jersey, Mr Hogan’s lawyers were asking Strachans for monthly bank statements for the account.

Mr Hogan and fellow Crocodile Dundee producer John Cornell made a confidential settlement with the ATO on April 30 last year, days after the Federal Court ruled that legal privilege did not apply to a swathe of documents produced by Mr Hogan’s accountants and US lawyer Craig Emanuel. Mr Emanuel was in Geneva two weeks later asking to examine the accounts for the Carthage Trust account but Strachans lawyer Paul Gully-Hand refused access.

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Mr Hogan’s Australian lawyer
Andrew Robinson
said yesterday Mr Hogan had told authorities he believed “he may be the beneficial owner of the funds . . . but cannot access them without the co-operation of the trustee". The structures “were set up legally and in accordance with extensive and sophisticated advice".

The court documents include an indemnity agreement signed by Mr Hogan in which he said: “I am fully in agreement with and endorse the proposed appointment [of the Strachans trustee] . . . I hereby declare . . . that I am completely satisfied that the trust assets have been invested or distributed in a manner of which I approve." The saga of Mr Hogan and Strachans principal Philip Egglishaw began in 2004 when Australian Crime Commission investigators raided a Melbourne hotel room and seized Mr Egglishaw’s laptop filled with details of his Australian clients, sparking the Project Wickenby investigation.

The chief executive of the Crime Commission, John Lawler, told The Australian Financial Review on Monday that there had been no change to the commission’s decision of November 2010, when it dropped its investigation of Mr Hogan and Mr Cornell, but said it continued to investigate “the promoters and facilitators of highly sophisticated tax-evasion schemes that operate within Australia and overseas".

This appeared to be a reference to the ACC’s ongoing investigation of Mr Hogan’s Australian accountant, Tony Stewart.